SFR Selects Exstream Software's Dialogue

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Press release from the issuing company

Exstream Software announced today that SFR, France’s second largest mobile telephony provider and the country’s only private operator offering fixed line and mobile services, has selected its Dialogue software. SFR adopted Exstream’s Dialogue to be its single platform for creating and fully personalizing the more than eight million transactional communications (40 million pages) it sends to customers monthly. With Dialogue, SFR has greatly increased customer response to its marketing campaigns and significantly reduced document development costs.
Key drivers in SFR’s selection of Dialogue included its inherent ease of use and ergonomics; robust marketing campaign management capabilities for creating targeted messages, inserts and mailings; and ability to deliver documents through multiple channels from a single design. This has greatly enhanced customer response to SFR’s marketing campaigns, as well as reduced calls to its contact center. Additionally, Dialogue’s ability to simultaneously produce AFP and PDF output in the same print stream has significantly reduced development time and labor costs, while satisfying SFR’s outsourced production requirements. Dialogue dynamically builds all the necessary resources based on the targeted output device, resulting in the most efficient output processing possible. This allows SFR to automate document archival, eliminating costly manual processes while complying with legal obligations.
“Dialogue is for us the single platform for design and personalization of our important documents—in particular the customer invoice—which is our most important communication and a unifying force in the relationship with our customers,” said Nicolas Boutin, customer document manager for SFR. “We credit Dialogue with the good perception and high quality of SFR invoices. By using the software we work faster and more efficiently to provide our customers more relevant and personalized documents, which ultimately increases their loyalty.”
Using Dialogue, SFR’s marketing department creates rules-driven variable messages that are either dynamically incorporated into the double-sided invoice at run time or created as an insert, such as Minimag, according to the profile of the recipient. Prior to launch, the marketing department uses Dialogue to test the targeted campaigns for validation. For example, SFR has tested whether or not the use of color in documents impacts customer’s perception and response. SFR reports that customer feedback on these targeted campaigns is “highly satisfying” and has resulted in increased traffic to its website, as well as generated a “notable increase” in revenue and customer retention. Additionally, SFR reports a notable saving of time is carried out between an operational decision and moving to production. Modifications which took many hours before are now made in one hour with Dialogue.
“As a leader in France’s telecommunications industry, SFR is a forward-thinking company that understands the power of its billing statements when it comes to building stronger customer relationships,” said Jean-Jacques Joly, managing director for Exstream France & Southern Europe. “We are very happy that Dialogue is satisfying SFR with bottom-line results in cost and time savings, and most importantly, customer satisfaction.”